In the beginning of the essay "White Enough" by Richard Dyer he starts with a section that I thought really sumed up a good amount of the essay. "The dirtiness of the dancing in Dirty Dancing is most obviously sexual, and faily obviously class-based; rather more equivocally, it is also racial. As Anahid Kassabian notes, the dirty dancing is "not-quite-white"; I was to argues that, all the same, it is white enough. (Richard Dryer)
It seems that a common theme throughout his whole essay and that is about the "nice Jewish boys" (73) The other themes that go throughout the essay have to do with Prostitution, Socio-Economic class of "Neil at Cornell and Robbie at Yale, paths that mean they are just the kinds of boys Lisa and Baby, respectively, should have sex (that is, dance and have babies) with." (73) The other example is when "Neil reminds Baby of what he's got that Johnny doesn't and that all the girls adore; two hotels." (74)
The author goes on to talk about the not-quite-white aspect and it has to do with the "real dirty dancers, are very mixed racially, and many might be perceived (probably correctly) as Latina/o." (76) To better affirm what the author is saying he goes on to say, "In all the ways, a great deal of the dancing, whether sexually awkward or abandoned, is coded as not-quite-white." (76)
Along with all of this, the author throws in a little comment about Max at the end of the film when he gets on stage with Coles who is the band leader. The author is talking about how it seems that "there may be a very slight anxiety around gender and queerness with the limp wrist and dancing with a man [albeit not touching], but that doesn't seem to me to be at the forefront of this short moment.
This article was difficult to really read and take in because he did a lot of reusing the same ideas of socio-economic class, race/racist ideas, culture. Like I said before it was a lot of the same information over and over so there wasn't a lot of information or his opinion that I didn't know just that it was incredibly reused a lot.
Dyer, Richard. "White Enough." The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture.
Eds. Yannis Tzioumakis and Sian Lincoln. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2013. 73-85.
I like how you added the quotes from he movie at the end, and I agree that this movie was one that I did wear out watching it over and over again. I also agree that I never noticed the real issues that are linked to this movie until we watched it in class. But even known there are so many issues I still don't agree with everthing. For example we as women are always quick to point the finger at the men, well what about the women. For example the women Lisa saw with Robbie the night she was going to have sex for the first time with; she is one that seduces many of the men including Johnny. Why don't we talk about her? She caused many of the problems between everyone. Or how Penny made the decision to sleep with Robbie in the first place without protection, known she could get pregnant. See I have my own views on women and women studies, and one of them I don't like is were so quick to judge the men but not the women. And for Dirty Dancing I think this shows a good example of both side causing problems. I also love how organized your blog it, sorry that we just didn't get to work on it together, considering we have the same thoughts on women studies.
ReplyDeleteI really loved the layout of your blog and how you gave credit to the author. I also enjoyed how you related your scholarly essay to the movie. Loved the "white enough" aspect.
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